Gold: Enduring Power, Sacred Craft
This exhibition explores the artistic and cultural function of gold in approximately 60 works of art drawn from across the collections of the Norton Simon Museum, which encompass South and Southeast Asia, Europe, North Africa and North America. This compelling group of objects, spanning from around 1000 BCE to the 20th century, reveals unexpected intersections in the circulation, craft and meaning of gold across time and place.
Gold’s elemental nature lends significance to many of the artworks on view in the exhibition. In the realm of religious art, the metal’s malleable yet incorruptible quality enabled artists to create enduring images of devotion. Gilt Hindu and Buddhist sculptures from the 12th to 20th centuries were commissioned by donors to emphasize the spiritual attainments and deified status of various religious figures. The gold on these objects represents one of the highest forms of offering, in terms of both economic and aesthetic value, and it was intended to accumulate merit and provide protection for devotees. Intricate details wrought by the hands of skilled artisans centuries ago are still preserved in the corrosion-resistant metal, which ensured the longevity of the object’s splendor and spiritual power. In 14th- and 15th-century Europe, artists of Christian images used extraordinarily thin, hammered gold leaf to create shimmering divine realms, an effect once dramatically enhanced by candlelit churches and private altars.
Gold’s rarity, and the expertise required to harness it as a medium, contributed to its impact as a visual expression of power. The objects in this exhibition were crafted from metal excavated from mines across three continents and transported over vast regions, often in the form of currency. In the hands of trained craftspeople, this processed gold was transformed into jewelry that adorned Roman patrician women or spun into thread that was then woven into textiles for elite patrons in Europe and Asia. The long historical thirst for gold motivated California’s own extractive 19th-century mining practices, the legacy of which is explored through photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
New technical analysis conducted for this exhibition helped to identify the objects’ fundamental material properties, which provoked further questions about their significance—are these works actually gold, and what does it mean if they are not? In some cases, gilding versus solid gold becomes an issue, because it is the purity and preciousness of the material itself that gives these objects power. Alternatively, when “gold” is created through the treatment of another metal such as brass, or by skillful illusionistic painting, the gleaming effect and impressive artistic alchemy become more important than the raw materials.
Organized on the occasion of the Museum’s 50th anniversary, a milestone traditionally associated with this metal, Gold: Enduring Power, Sacred Craft invites fresh inquiry into the nature of gold as an artistic medium. In the process, the exhibition generates new conversations about the cultural and material resilience of these objects, many of which will be displayed together for the first time.
